There exists no /usr/distfiles on a typical Gentoo install. Do you mean /usr/portage or /usr/portage/distfiles? You can use "eclean-dist -d" to clean up distfiles, and you can remove /var/tmp/portage/* to free up space from previous failed merges.

Since the harddisk was filling, not necessarily: Could be that a file in /var/cache/edb was corrupted due to lack of space. It might help to move this directory out of the way.

Still, throwing a backtrace at people is not a valid thing to do even if some data files are corrupted. The exception should be caught with a clear error message, e.g. pointing out the corruption as a possible problem._________________http://phajdan-jr.blogspot.com/

I changed my distfiles dir to /usr/distfiles for lvm reasons in 2009, worked ever since, should not matter for this problem

1. I ran
# emerge -NuDav world
2. emerge halted for security reasons: hdd was filling up
3. I did a
# eclean -d distfiles
4. still there were about 12 GB+ in /usr/distfiles after "ecleaning"
5. so I "just" removed all files in /usr/distfiles hoping to refetch what was needed when re-emerging world
6. when doing another emerge -NuDav wolrd traceback error accured.

I changed "gnutls" in /etc/make.conf to "-gnutls" but it still refuses to download.
So I guess I'll have to download the sources manually, copy them into /usr/distfiles and emerge then.

But still: why does wget require libgnutls.so.26 when it is not installed. Why doesn't libgnutls.so.3.1.10 appear in /usr/lib? And what is the system behind the numbers (libgnutls.so.28) when there are available versions for 2.12 onward - no version 2.8 or 28?

Got it! Don't know if this is compatible to gentoo guidelines but I symlinked libgnutls.so.28 to libgnutls.so.26 and it did the trick!

I think it can work to get more things working - just make sure to remove the workaround afterwards - it's not really guaranteed to work and can result in weird crashes._________________http://phajdan-jr.blogspot.com/